High Sierra Topix

Whenever I took a side trip I would leave some stuff, including hanging the rest of my food, for my return. Upon my return each time my stuff, and more importantly my food was still there. I believe I was very lucky those 5-10 times. I say this because there were times I hung equip. for a return later that season and it was not there nearly every time. The biggest chance I (we) ever took was at Junction Meadow on the Kern. How would you like to hike out from there with no food? The good thing is that our car was South of Trout Meadow. I knew, of course, that we could live on a steady diet of fish for the remainder of the trip, however my wife (saint Diane) really didn't like fish. She would have been soooo upset with me and deservedly so.

Ive never had anything stolen in the backcountry, but have seen cars vandalized at trailheads etc. I recall there being a bit of an epidemic with that for awhile in the early 80's at the Owens valley trailheads. In fact in the backcountry Ive had people leave things, not take them.

On one of my early backpacking trips we camped near this more seasoned solo hiker on Bear Creek (on his invitation) as we starggled in laste in the day. We were very new to backpacking and had some really heavy packs for a 9 day trip. That night by the fire he talked with us on ways to lighten our packs and it was information I would uindeed put to use. The next morning, we woke to find him long gone, but he had left behind some powdered gatorade and some hard candies (if our packs werent heavy enough already ) and a note telling us to enjoy ourseleves.

On another trip to the Ruby Mtns in NE Nevada, we hiked into a lake and found one other group of 2 camped there. They were on the other shore and we generally only caught glimpses of them fishing, but we bumped into them the next day as we fished our way around the lake. We all laughed when we found we were all from Cali. They indicated they had been in the region for about 2 weeks, and the pack trip was the last thing they were doing before heading home. They said they had caught some really big rainbows from the nearby Ruby Marsh. The next day my brother and I did a cross country hike to a nearby lake. When we returned, we found a big slab of smoked rainbow trout in a bag on top of the big rock near our camp with a note to enjoy. It did indeed add nicely to our freeze dried meals.

Never in the backcountry.

But a BIG surprise one December morning in Yosemite Valley. Had our whole mini trailer stolen off the double locked hitch of our truck, filled with my crafts display.